My colleagues Neal Dickert, Dave Wendler and I organized a workshop on a new way of looking at informed consent for research--what we call a 'function-based approach'--and the resulting paper is now in print at AJOB, with commentaries by various authors and an editorial by Tom Beauchamp.

Our analysis of euthanasia cases in the Netherlands that their review committees deemed as "due care not met" (i.e., according to their euthanasia law's requirements) was just published on BMJ Open.

Mental Health and Justice, a project based at King's College London with Gareth Owen as the principal investigator, has now been launched. I am a core member of the research team. It is funded by the Wellcome Trust and addresses a central ethical question in mental health law: how do we balance the protection of decisionally impaired persons with the need to promote their autonomy? This is a large, multi-year, multi-disciplinary project.

If a person cannot understand the facts relevant to a medical decision, or is too confused to use the information, or has a delusion that misinterprets the actual facts, then we usually say that the person lacks decision-making capacity for that medical decision. But what if a person's disorder does not impeded factual comprehension or does not involve a delusion about the facts but instead distorts the ability to appropriately value something--like a severely depressed person or a person with a brain tumor who develops a completely new desire contrary to everything he holds valuable? My co-author Lisa Eckstein and I explore the role of this 'ability to value' in capacity assessments in a new article. (Unfortunately not available online but available upon request).

Can neuroscience help us think about how to apply the criteria for assessing someone's decision-making capacity? This and many other questions that deal with the relationship between law and neuroscience were discussed at a recent conference sponsored by UCSF/Hastings School of Law. My panel talk and discussion can be found on the Talks Online page.

Do persons with severe mental disorders requesting euthanasia and assisted suicide (EAS) retain their capacity to make decisions? We recently published an analysis of how Dutch doctors and euthanasia review committees discuss this issue in the published case reports of psychiatric EAS.

Suppose a clinical trial is comparing two treatments that are already widely in use for a condition because it is not known which is better. Some doctors like one, others like the other treatment--but there is no rigorous evidence-base for the choice. Do such clinical trials involve research risks for participants? Do participants (patients in clinics, for example) need to know they are in the study? We recently published a framework for figuring out the research risks and its implications for informed consent.